Cryptozoology and the Troubles with Ìskepticsî and Mainstream Pundits Abominable Science by Daniel Loxton and Donald
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Journal of Scientifi c Exploration, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 690–704, 2013 0892-3310/13 ESSAY REVIEW Cryptozoology and the Troubles with “Skeptics” and Mainstream Pundits Abominable Science by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero. Columbia University Press, 2013. xvi + 411 pp. $29.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0231153201. This book is superbly produced by a prominent university press. It is also intellectually shoddy, even dishonest. Science is described in naïve shibboleths that bear no relation to how science is actually done. The chapters about individual cryptids are chock-full of misrepresentation and evasion of the best evidence. Abominable Science is unsatisfactory in ways that are all too common with self-styled “skeptics”: They assume authority but reveal ignorance. Their underlying agenda is scientism, the belief that whatever contemporary science says is true. They claim to speak for “science” but get much wrong about science and its history. They debunk instead of being skeptical. They do not engage honestly with the strongest evidence. They imply guilt by association (all anomalists are “flat-earthers”) and thereby lapse into irrelevance and ad hominem distortions. In addition, Abominable Science is extraordinarily replete with illogic. Loxton and Prothero purport to examine the cases of 5 cryptids: Bigfoot (Chapter 2), Yeti (Chapter 3), Nessie (Chapter 4), sea serpents (Chapter 5), Mokele Mbembe (Chapter 6). Chapter 1 is about whether cryptozoology is science or pseudo-science, and the concluding Chapter 7 asks why people believe in monsters. When I expanded the marginal notes I had made in the book while reading it, the result was some 20,000 words, far too much even for an Essay Review. So here I will concentrate on what the book gets wrong in general and say just a little about the distorted discussions of specific cryptids. The only reviews with any significant detail about the chapters on individual cryptids are at Amazon.com, by fans of Bigfoot and of Nessie. Two1,2 deal with the numerous errors in Chapter 2, taking, respectively, 1,800 and 1,500 Book Reviews 691 words to do so; a third3 takes more than 3,000 words to list some of the errors in Chapter 4. Loxton has responded to these in his blog.4,5 Since this review will not be kind, my biases ought to be made plain. For more than three decades I’ve worked in science studies (the usual acronym is STS, for Science & Technology Studies), with particular focus on controversies over scientifi c unorthodoxies, and my books in that genre (Bauer 1984, 1986, 1992, 2001a, 2001b, 2007, 2012a) have enjoyed uniformly favorable reviews.6 I also happen to believe that the evidence for the existence of “sea serpents” is highly plausible and for Nessies almost completely convincing—and I came to have as a good friend Tim Dinsdale, whose unique fi lm of a Nessie features in most controversies about Loch Ness Monsters (Dinsdale 2013). On the other hand, I would be quite surprised if Sasquatch turned out to be real—though I am more prepared for that possibility after reading Bindernagel (2010); and I would be enormously surprised if anything like Mokele Mbembe turned out to be real. I’m agnostic as to Yeti. Illogic, Non Sequitur, Over-Generalization, and Irrelevance The whole argument of Abominable Science boils down to the erroneous assertion that “highly unlikely” equals impossible: “This [fossil] record is good enough that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence” (p. 27). By contrast, Loxton and Prothero are quite willing to adduce mere speculation as support for their own views, for example, estimates of how many species remain to be discovered (p. 21 ff.): as though the history of discoveries up to now could be extrapolated validly with a possible error of less than ±1 species. “Most of the caveats and issues that apply to . [the creatures discussed in this book] also apply to all cryptids, so discussing them all would be largely redundant” (p. xiv). But Nessie could exist without Bigfoot being real, and vice versa. There is no photographic or sonar evidence for sea serpents, yet there is for Nessies. And so on. There are crucial differences galore between the many alleged cryptids. Each is an individual case, and in each one the devil is in the details. 692 Book Reviews Loxton writes that cryptozoologists evaluate eyewitness accounts in part according to the observer’s experience, presuming that people familiar with seals are more reliable about seals and not-seals than those who have never seen a seal, for example (p. 232). “Not so fast,” the reader is warned about this perfectly rational approach: Those who claim to have seen sea serpents, as well as “ESP researchers” [how are they relevant?], are “not randomly selected average observers,” they are a tiny proportion of the Earth’s population; and (citing Michael Shermer) “The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America.” How is that supposed to undercut the sensible approach of paying more attention to experienced observers than to naïve ones? By also remembering that “[o]penness to fi rst-person testimony” makes for gullibility (p. 3)? Should that vitiate the use of witnesses in the legal system? Huge swaths of the book are taken up with suggestions that modern eyewitnesses misinterpret what they see under the infl uence of folklore, legend, and mythology about imaginary creatures. All that is quite pointless: If remarkable creatures like Yeti exist, they would surely have found their way into folklore and myth; indeed, myths about such creatures might even suggest their possible existence (Bayanov 1982). Descriptions abound, page after page, of “documented misidentifi ca- tions” and of all the things that can lead to misidentifi cation (pp. 233–239). Because some reports are mistakes, therefore all reports have been mistakes? That does seem to be the intended implication: “Imagine that boat wakes fooled only . 1 in 100 million. Wakes and waves need convince only a handful of people a year to become a major part of monster lore!” (p. 239; exclamation mark in original). The same level of illogic is present ad nauseam throughout the book. There are innumerable lengthy descriptions of frauds and hoaxes as well as mistakes, as though that could be extrapolated to mean that everything not yet recognized as fraud or hoax must also have been such. “[T]he existence of most of the cryptids discussed in this book . goes against everything we know from biology, geology, and other sciences” (p. 10)—“everything”? “[M]any hunters shoot fi rst and ask questions later” (p. 15)—“many”? Such overgeneralization is accompanied by pervasive and unseemly self-praise, implicit when not explicit: “Skeptics are in the business of soberly considering strange claims” (p. 69). This book hardly exemplifi es that assertion. For these authors, the only unifying principle for identifying pseudo- science is that the subject is anathema to them. As a result, they persistently lump together topics that have no substantive commonality, for instance “considering UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, telekinesis, faith healing, and similar Book Reviews 693 elusive, paranormal phenomena” (p. 231); or “in regard to sea serpents— and, indeed, to paranormal claims in general” (p. 251). What is paranormal about unidentifi ed fl ying objects or hominid apes or sea serpents? That a reported object may not actually exist doesn’t make it paranormal, nor is a claim of its natural existence a paranormal claim. Then again, Loxton and Prothero are puzzled that so many people “believe” in UFOs or give credence to Holocaust deniers (p. 9); what’s the connection between those two matters, except that both are anathema to these authors? “Cryptozoology thrives on the failure to distinguish observations from conclusions” (p. 252) actually well describes the approach taken in this book. The conclusions came fi rst, namely, that all paranormal claims including cryptids are mistaken: “The truth is that sea serpents are shape- shifters. They are . creatures of culture, not of nature” (p. 256). The authors pride themselves on being scientifi c, yet perpetrate such vapid postmodernist emissions as this: “In all environments—in fi ction, in the cryptozoological literature, and in the oceans of the mind—sea monsters teem and vary and return to type, as unpredictable, as unique, and yet as familiar as the waves themselves” (p. 256). Nevertheless, reality and common sense break through in a few places: “It’s just barely possible that genuine sightings of new creatures may be among the evidence” (p. 236). So why take up more than 400 pages attempting to deny it? If one wanted to critique cryptozoology in an intellectually honest and sound manner, one would seek to address what the best evidence appears to be for each cryptid. This book doesn’t do that, it does the very opposite, as when it brushes aside (pp. 159, 170–173) the copious sonar data from Loch Ness7. Cryptozoologists are concerned not only with such highly improbable cryptids as Mokele Mbembe, they also pursue such not-very- implausible possible “survivors” as the Eastern panther in the USA and the thylacine in Australia. The 13 volumes of the journal Cryptozoology include items about the identifi cation by cryptozoologists of some cryptids as known species, the ri of New Guinea as a dugong and the onza of Mexico as a puma. Abominable Science, however, chooses to discuss only cryptids representing the very least probable of the seven categories in Greenwell’s (1985) classifi cation of cryptozoology. Ignorance about Science Abominable Science suffers from many of the common misunderstandings about how science is actually done: that “the scientifi c method” delivers trustworthy results, that falsifi ability is a criterion for being scientifi c, that science can be believed because it is self-correcting.